Cathedral Basilica upgrades with Renkus-Heinz Iconyx line arrays

The century-old Cathedral Basilica, Saint Louis, US, has installed a Renkus-Heinz Iconyx line array system. Valley Park, Missouri-based systems integrator Cignal Systems handled design and installation of the new audio solution at the 2000-seat cathedral, which is renowned for its mosaic works, which comprise 41.5 million pieces and cover 83,000sqft.

The old cabinet style sound system had been unable to compete with the cathedral’s acoustically challenging architecture, which is capped with a 150ft-high dome at its center.

"There are so many concave surfaces, with 360º of windows, and the dome just exacerbates everything. There's not a soft surface in there - marble floors, hard pews - and there are transepts on either side that create even more reflections," explained Gary Haselhorst, president at Cignal Systems.

The solution presented itself in the form of Iconyx digitally steerable column arrays from Renkus-Heinz. Cignal Systems deployed a pair of Iconyx IC32-R-II columns left and right of the altar platform, enabling sound to be steered away from the reflective surfaces.

A second set of Iconyx IC16-R-II columns were mounted midway back in the room as delays to deal with delivering sound to the transepts. Time alignment is handled within the Iconyx software, while a pair of Symetrix Radius units provides additional signal processing.